Digital Only Subscription
Read the digital SMART Edition of The Times-Tribune on your PC or mobile device, and have 24/7 access to breaking news, local sports, contests, and more at thetimes-tribune.com or on our mobile apps.

Digital Services
Have news alerts sent to your mobile device, read the Smart Edition sign up for daily newsletters, activate your all access, enter contests, take quizzes, download our mobile apps and see the latest e-circulars.

Twenty-five years ago tonight, professional baseball returned to Northeast Pennsylvania.

When Rick Muntean thinks of the 25 years that have passed, he remembers a conversation.

It happened at a party. He’s sure about that much. It might have been at what is now the Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel in Scranton, somewhere around the 15th or 16th of April, back in 1989. Those have become sketchy details now, though.

Blurred, like plenty of the facts and figures, by the reality that so many years have passed, so many moments soaked in, there are bound to be some that washed away all together.

But this conversation, Muntean remembers. Remembers like it happened yesterday. Remembers it now like he’ll remember it in another 25 years.

“So, I met this guy,” the story begins, “and he tells me, ‘Three years.’ He said, ‘That team will not make it three years here.’ I almost got into a fistfight with this guy. I told him no. There was no way he was going to be right.

“We were going to show him.”

Ten or 11 days later, the process of “showing them” began at the foot of Montage Mountain, in a baseball park where the paint literally had not yet dried, amidst a reality that hardly seemed real.

A quarter century ago tonight, on April 26, 1989, a right-hander named John Martin threw a first pitch, and an athletic young outfielder named Keith Miller hit a home run and a team wearing white uniforms with maroon pinstripes lost a baseball game to the Tidewater Tides. It was the night the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons and the $22 million Lackawanna County Multi-Purpose Stadium became unified, a duo that would be a staple in the community for 19 years and pave the way for a generation of professional baseball fans to enjoy the game affordably within a reasonable drive of any home in the region in what then-Philadelphia Phillies president Bill Giles called “the finest ballpark in minor league baseball.”

It was also a night some thought might never come.

n n n

Everybody wanted to run on the emerald green turf. You found turf like that in the big leagues back then. But not in places like Scranton. One look inside that hulking, state-of-the-art — at the time, anyway — structure lay a ballfield area kids dreamed they’d play on someday.

Jeremy Ruby was one of them.

The 13-year-old had the best summer job in Northeast Pennsylvania the night Lackawanna County Stadium opened. He was a bat boy, stationed in the

Tidewater dugout, soaking in the atmosphere in a ballpark he could hardly believe stood practically in his backyard.

“I was scared to death,” Ruby said. “We didn’t even have bat boy outfits. I remember wearing a pair of plain, gray pants from Battaglia’s (Sporting Goods), and we all had Red Barons sweatshirts on. That was our attire. No one had a clue, including the people who worked here. We kind of just ran with it. We weren’t told anything to do other than to stay out of play. It was a crazy scene.

“Something, I guess, I’ll never forget.”

Ask him about details of the game — who had big hits, who pitched, even who won the game — and those are the memories blurred by time. What he does remember is one of the players played the timeless baseball prank known as the hot foot on him, lighting his shoelaces on fire. Another player also pushed a dollop of shaving cream on top of his head, and when he ran onto the field to grab a bat, the delighted overflow crowd of 10,958 fans took notice and cheered.

Sixteen years later, the bat boy who gave them a good laugh on their first opening night would be named the fourth general manager in the Red Barons’ history.

n n n

“I remember the first words I spoke,” said John Davies, Lackawanna County Stadium’s longtime public address announcer, falling into the same excited bellow that became his trademark for more than 20 years. “’Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the beautiful Lackawanna County Multi-Purpose Stadium. For the first time in 36 years, baseball is back in Northeastern Pennsylvania.’

“And then, I heard the roar.”

The region waited a long time for a night like that.

And not just since the end of the 1953 season, when manager Maury Aderholt and the Scranton Miners finished a 51-100 season and the Eastern League never returned to Scranton-Dunmore Stadium.

They had been waiting since 1977, when Scranton attorney John McGee set out to accomplish what he considered his dream: Bringing professional baseball back to the area.

The goal seemed more straight-forward than the process became.

He started an organization, Northeast Baseball, that would spearhead the process. But the organization needed money.

So, McGee began the monumental, nearly-decade-long campaign to solicit season-ticket money from fans. There were more hope than guarantees. The organization still needed a franchise.

So, McGee used the money he collected from the fans interested in season tickets and, by January of 1985, purchased the Double-A Waterbury Indians of the Eastern League. Those fans who poured money into season tickets had their team. By the spring of 1987, the plan went, Double-A baseball would return to Northeast Pennsylvania.

Only, McGee had bigger plans. What he really dreamed was to land a franchise that played in the Triple-A International League, and after a front office was hired to run the Double-A operations, he reached a deal with Jordan Kobritz, the owner of Cleveland’s Triple-A team, the Maine Guides. Basically, it was a trade: Maine’s Triple-A franchise to Northeast Baseball for its Double-A franchise and $1 million.

The deal had a caveat that would become a major story over the next few years: If the Eastern League for some reason blocked Maine from entering, Kobritz would get another $1 million, and the team would still head here.

“The original goal was to bring Triple-A baseball to Northeastern Pennsylvania,” the Red Barons’ first general manager, Bill Terlecky, recalled. “But we wanted to get the project going. The only thing we could purchase at the time was the Double-A team in the Eastern League. We got people talking. But we also had the escalating costs over time. Everybody was wondering, ‘Can we do this?’”

n n n

Four o’clock on the first gameday in Lackawanna County Stadium history.

Muntean, then the Red Barons’ assistant general manager, decided to take a stroll around the ballpark to make sure everything was ready for the fans.

That’s when he noticed the painters putting a few more coats on the railings.

Hours earlier, he got out of his car in downtown Scranton and headed into team headquarters near the Lackawanna County commissioners’ offices — theirs weren’t ready inside the stadium yet — and he could feel the excitement in the streets. The vibe, he said, was electric. The Electric City was ready for baseball.

Even if the stadium, as picturesque and modern as it was for its day, barely would be.

The Red Barons’ first trainer, the late Barney Nugent, broke the news to Terlecky that day that there were no electrical outlets in the trainer’s room. A few nights before the opener, the Red Barons’ shipment of bats mistakenly was sent to a Little League field in Rochester. Ron Reino, the stadium’s first music director, had to learn the night of the game how to use the new equipment. Davies, behind a microphone for the first time in his life, was so nervous he had to read from a script, reminding himself over and over again to stare straight ahead, toward center field, so as not to be overwhelmed by the history or the excitement.

“None of our employees knew what the heck they were doing,” Muntean laughed.

Until that night, after all, there wasn’t even a stadium to train them in.

Muntean remembered very little about the game — “We didn’t play very well,” and “Miller hit a homer” were about it — but he did remember noticing an usher behind home plate guiding people to their seats while swigging a beer, for example.

Mostly, though, he remembers the party on the suite level, where fans roamed from one box to another, meeting new friends and cheering on the team they had only known for a matter of innings. He remembers the opening ceremony, where the first pitch seemed to take 15 minutes and an elaborate balloon launch was organized to usher in the new era. He remembered overflow crowds in the team store, where fans bought anything they could grab with a Red Barons logo on it.

“Everything went off without a hitch,” he said. “And looking back on that, what a miracle.”

No hitches. No glitches.

Well, except for maybe one thing.

“We get this letter three, four, maybe five months later,” Muntean went on. “It said that one of those balloons we launched washed up on the Jersey Shore and that, maybe, it wasn’t such a good idea to let them go. That might have killed some birds.”

n n n

There was no baseball in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre in 1987, of course. That January, Kobritz, the Maine owner slighted by the Eastern League, sued Northeast Baseball to retain ownership of the Guides because the deal would not include the Double-A franchise. In March, a court in Portland, Maine, sided in Kobritz’s favor. Triple-A baseball was, for 10 months, nothing more than a pipe dream again.

“It was a battle,” Terlecky said.

In the meantime, there was still no stadium, either. So the Double-A franchise Northeast Baseball owned was moved to Williamsport, where the Williamsport Bills debuted under the authority of Terlecky and Muntean at then-lightless Bowman Field. The Indians’ Double-A affiliate made its biggest mark when, that summer, catcher Roger Bresnahan threw a potato into left field, prompting a baserunner on third to come home, only to be tagged out by Bresnahan, who held the real baseball. Due to his deception,

Bresnahan was banished from the Eastern League.

They didn’t know if better times would come until an appeals court ruled in January of 1988 that the Triple-A franchise legally belonged to Northeast Baseball.

While the stadium was being built, at much greater cost than initially expected, Terlecky went to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where he operated the lame-duck Maine Phillies for a season. When he got to The Ball Park, he found everything at the stadium not bolted down — the pitching rubber, home plate, even the water heaters — had been torn out by Kobritz.

Back home, McGee worked to secure the additional funding to cover the overages at the stadium. Some came from the state and then-Gov. Robert P. Casey. Lackawanna and Luzerne counties would cover the rest.

County ownership of a Triple-A baseball team at a state-of-the-art facility at the foot of burgeoning Montage Mountain, at long last, was a guarantee.

“I don’t think it can ever be done (that way) again,” Terlecky said.

n n n

Looking back, knowing there were no guarantees there would ever be baseball and with the spectre of a legal battle looming, Terlecky said it still amazes him that no fan who put money toward season tickets back in the mid-1980s ever lost faith and asked for a dime of it back.

Joanne Salitis’ father, Gus Franchetti, never dreamed of it.

Growing up, she was regaled with baseball stories. Most of them had to do with Gus’ beloved Yankees. His daughter remembered hearing how he’d rush from school to the barbershop near his Jessup home, because the barber would tune in to the Yankees game daily on the radio.

So of course, the Franchettis were there on opening night — even though Gus’ beloved Yankees wouldn’t have their Triple-A affiliate playing home games there for another 18 years. The Red Barons were their team, and they didn’t have to earn the loyalty.

She didn’t remember the Chinook helicopter, hovering a few thousand feet over the field as members of the West Point Black Knights sky-diving team jumped from it. She didn’t remember one of those divers landing on the mound, to deliver the baseball, The choir singing a 59-part rendition of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame?” The Moosic Little Leaguers on the field for the balloon launch? Time has made all of that fuzzy.

What Salitis does remember is her father jumping at the chance to hand over enough cash to cover two season tickets to McGee and Northeast Baseball in 1982.

They’d wait seven years to sit in that stadium, on that night.

“It was exciting,” she said. “I know my dad was very excited because baseball was back in the area, and he could remember going to see the Scranton Red Sox. He was ecstatic they were coming back. It was an exciting feeling to have baseball back in the area.”

Two years later, the high school student bundled up in the second row from the top of the upper deck got a job as an usher at Lackawanna County Stadium — even though she wasn’t much of a baseball fan at the time.

She still has that job.

“I adore this place,” Salitis said as she smiled.

n n n

The Red Barons lost, 9-2.

Tommy Barrett, the leadoff man for the Red Barons, started things off with a triple. They were never really in it after that, though. WNEP aired the

game live, and even as the coverage of minor league baseball has ballooned since then, the first-ever Red Barons game had a major-league feel.

“The place was just crawling with people, and they didn’t care whether we won or lost,” Davies said. “They were just so happy to have baseball back.

“For so long after the Scranton Red Sox and Wilkes-Barre Barons left, all we had was legion baseball and the old Scranton Association and the Scranton

Red Sox in the ECBL. So that night was a tremendous night. I was 35 going on 11.”

Twenty-five years ago tonight, the same could be said of an entire region.

Baseball was back. To stay.

Contact the writer: dcollins@timesshamrock.com

We welcome user discussion on our site, under the following guidelines:

To comment you must first create a profile and sign-in with a verified DISQUS account or social network ID. Sign up here.

Comments in violation of the rules will be denied, and repeat violators will be banned. Please help police the community by flagging offensive comments for our moderators to review. By posting a comment, you agree to our full terms and conditions. Click here to read terms and conditions.